Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (20 page)

Though Scott and I were, by comparison to some of our neighbors, lacking in every material way, we felt fortunate—because what we
did
have while we were anticipating Scott’s big Broadway success was the camaraderie of our wonderful next-door neighbors, Ring and Ellis Lardner.

Scott and Ring were fast friends right from the start, a made-in-heaven pair like cherries and chocolate. One October weekend morning I was awakened by raised voices coming from somewhere in the house. I said, “Scott. Scott, wake up. I think I hear Nanny arguing with someone.”

This was a new nanny, of course; she was less severe than the one in St. Paul, yet more possessive, hardly willing to let Scottie out of her sight. We had to force her to take days off just so we could spend time alone with our baby girl. I wondered whether we’d all been better off before.

Scott said, “Probably Albert. Is there aspirin on your nightstand?”

“It’s not Albert; it’s Sunday.” We gave Albert and Angela, the live-in couple who served us as butler-cook-housekeeper-chambermaid for one-sixty a month, Sundays off.

“Sunday? What? That can’t be right. It was just Thursday. You’ve had a nightmare. Go back to sleep.”

It
was
just Thursday for Scott, who’d begun drinking while at tennis and had, along with Ring and writers John Dos Passos and Carl Van Vechten, kept the party going until the liquor ran out. Ellis and I had given up on our men by Friday evening and spent Saturday at the beach with the children—she had four boys. Scottie, almost a year old, toddled around on the sand like a drunkard herself, pointing to each new discovery as if it was her first ever, and yelling “Ma!” every time. Nanny, of course, hovered nearby, pesky as a horsefly.

That Sunday morning, what we heard next was a rich tenor from just beyond the bedroom door:

“Fitzgerald,
hoo
! I herald
yo-o-u
! The sun is creeping higher. You promised
mee
a symphon-
ee
of putters, woods, and drivers!”

“What did I tell you?” I said, throwing back the covers and reaching for my robe. With Ring, you could never be sure he wouldn’t come right into the bedroom and take a seat at the foot of the bed to tell you all about the six fish he’d caught while out with one or other of the neighbors, or the six fish he planned to catch, or the six fish he was going to miss catching thanks to Scott’s promise to play nine holes with him—and that was all right with him, he’d say magnanimously; such things couldn’t be helped.

“My God, how does he do it?” Scott asked.

Differently than Scott had managed, that’s all I knew.

*   *   *

We’d been in Great Neck for a little over a year when, in the weak afternoon sunlight of New Year’s Day 1924, I sat at our kitchen table with a brand-new ledger book in front of me. It was green leather and had been a Christmas gift from Scott. “If you don’t start keeping better track of things, it will all be lost to you later,” he’d said. “I’d be an absolute disaster without mine.”

Scottie was taking her after-lunch nap. Scott was still sleeping off the previous night’s effects; we’d gone to a tremendous masquerade party at Ziegfeld’s four-story mansion, where I’d been dressed, quite extravagantly, as Madame du Barry. Most of our help had the afternoon off, so the house was quiet and still, perfect for me to try bringing into focus the blur our time at 6 Gateway Drive had been so far.

I wrote the date and our address, then began making a list of my impressions and recollections:

H
ERE IN
G
REAT
N
ECK …

• Salt in the air always.

• Insanely high prices for everything. Scott saying, more than once, that we’d run out of money.

• The train into Manhattan, drinks and parties at the Plaza and the Ritz-Carlton.

• Racing up and down Long Island in fast, fancy cars, laughing like crazy, picking bugs from our hair afterward.

• My Union Square fountain dive immortalized as a silhouette sewn onto the Greenwich Village Follies curtain—no sign of Gene Bankhead, though, anywhere.

• Scottie’s first words: Mama, mine, no.

• The sale of
This Side of Paradise
to the movies.

“We’re getting our ten thousand dollars after all!” Scott had said when that deal came through, waltzing me around the living room while Albert and Angela looked on, probably anticipating a raise. Or anticipating new and better ways to pad the quantities of food and goods they were already filching, which Scott and I knew was going on but ignored because we feared losing them.

I was as relieved about that sale as I was delighted about it, because while I remained uninvolved in our finances, I always knew by Scott’s moods when we were flush and when we weren’t, and was getting a sense, too, of when he’d allowed us to creep into the red.

• Astonishing parties at astonishing mansions: we met every movie star, every producer—Cohan, Ziegfeld—every suspected bootlegger millionaire—and got close to Gene and Helen Buck, Gene being Ziegfeld’s main collaborator, a hugely talented songwriter and not coincidentally also a millionaire.

• Scott getting too close to Helen Buck; both of them denying there was anything to it.

• That first year’s New Year’s party, when I took everyone’s hats and made a game of tossing them into the biggest bowl-shaped light fixture I’d ever seen. Not everyone was amused, but it seemed terribly gay to me at the time.

• Scott writing title cards and scenarios for the movies—his “Grit” scenario sells for $2000.

• Scott’s play,
The Vegetable
, and its crushing failure.

That was in November of ’22, when it opened in Atlantic City and was so awfully bad that some of the audience walked out during the second act. I’d believed in
The Vegetable
as fully as Scott had and could never understand how what had seemed to work in rehearsal came off so badly at the tryout opening. I’d helped Scott write the play. Bunny had read and loved it. Max loved it—even published a revised version as a novel the next year. Sure, it had taken a long time to get a producer on board, but then it
did
get produced. So where had we gone wrong?

• Scott, missing for two days soon after the play closed; he came home hungover and unsure of where he’d been, or with whom. Smell of perfume on his shirt.

• Scott on the wagon all of January, February, and March, so that he could write enough stories for the slicks—ten in all—to see us through last year (1923), during which he intended to write the novel that he’d put off writing in anticipation of the play’s success. Novel still not done.

• My first real spells of uncertainty, of doubt.

• $2000-a-game croquet tournaments on Herbert Swope’s manicured lawn, played after dark with car headlights to illuminate the course.

• Dancing with Scott, me in a gown, he in a tuxedo, on a wide canvas dance floor with torches lighting the night. Champagne, orchestras, canapés, kisses.

• Guests in our house always: Tootsie, Eleanor, Scott’s Aunt Annabel, Max Perkins. John Dos Passos and Archie MacLeish (writers), Don Stewart (humorist), Gilbert Seldes (critic)—he loves Scott. Alec and his crush Esther Murphy.

• Unmarked, empty liquor bottles like lines of tired soldiers on our kitchen counters.

• The Hearst magazines option: gives them first-look at Scott’s stories and a guarantee of $1500 for the ones they take;
photograph of Scott and me together on the cover of Hearst International
. We are stars!

• “Our Own Movie Queen,” my first short story; Scott and Harold said it’s better to send it out under Scott’s name because I’d get more money for it. Harold sold it for $1000 to the
Chicago Sunday Tribune
.

• Scottie, with her little chubby legs, standing on Scott’s shoulders, her hands in his, the two of them giggling wildly as he galloped her across the lawn.

• Interviews—of Scott, of me, of me and Scott together. “The Fitzgeralds are as popular as movie stars,” we’re told, and everyone wants to know how we see the world. They want to see us: so we, and Scottie, are photographed for numerous features and now we
really
feel like stars.

• Scott’s “The Popular Girl” brings $1500 from the
Post
, his highest price so far.

• Helen Buck and me playing golf while tight; they say I went wandering down the fairways, but I don’t recall that part.

• Eleanor’s visit, when we met Scott at the Plaza. He had Anita Loos in tow, champagne in hand. He’d been drinking cause he hates the dentist, then celebrating his survival afterward. That night at home: some woman at the door in search of Scott. My accusations make Scott pull the tablecloth right off the table, dishes flying everywhere. El, Anita, and me so tight we could only laugh at him.

• Scott’s “How to Live on $36,000 a Year” for the
Post
makes a funny story of our inability to make do with so much money.

That essay was all fiction—the “we” in the story is a couple who manage their money (or fail to) jointly, unlike the “we” in our real life. Daddy saw it and wrote me, “This is what Mama and I were afraid of. Our friends are aghast. However, the youngsters here think you two are gods, and if that doesn’t trouble you, I fear you are lost for good.”

• A feeling, always, of standing on a precipice with a stiff wind at our backs. Nothing to hold on to.

The ledger did help me, though, to hang on to the details of that time. What I realized in doing it, however, was that maybe we didn’t know quite as much—about anything—as we’d thought we did.

And I was scared.

21

Early May 1924: What little snow we’d seen over the winter was long gone, and spring had exploded all over Long Island. Tiny leaves clung to every tree’s limbs in uncertain but determined assurance to remain in place no matter what; cherry trees blossomed; tulips crowded around front stoops or carpeted entire lawns, their yellow and red and pink and white heads swaying languidly in the southerly breeze.

We were packing up, this time for a move to France in the hopes that our money would stretch further there and Scott would finally write his next book. Everyone said that Americans were living like kings there, so of course we wanted to go. On our last morning in Great Neck, Ring and Ellis came over to say a final good-bye. We stood outside on the lawn while a small team of workmen loaded our belongings onto a truck. What furniture we’d accumulated would go into storage; the rest of what we owned was now crammed into seventeen trunks of various sizes, half of which contained books.

In addition to this mountain of leather and canvas was one hundred feet of baled copper mesh. A man lifted the roll to load it, and Ring, pointing, said, “What in the world—”

“French mosquitoes have a taste for American blood,” Scott told him. “Ungrateful bastards.”

“And you intend, what, to wrap yourselves in that stuff like chain mail?”

“To screen our windows.”

“They won’t have screens already?”

“Can’t take chances,” Scott said.

“Um, you’ll be living in
France,
” Ring replied.

“Yes, where
all three of us
will be able to eat three meals apiece for a total of two dollars a day. I have got to get this damn book written, and I won’t do it if I’m forever beholden to the slicks.”

A brilliant yellow car pulled into the driveway behind the truck, and Esther Murphy, an artist, heiress, and wild woman we’d met through Alec, got out. I was startled to see her wearing snug-fitting trousers, which she’d tucked into a pair of boots.

“What’s this?” she said, waving to us. “Scared you off, did we?”

“No, it’s been grand here, but some of us still work for our living,” Scott said as she approached. “Or are supposed to. We’re getting a place in France for a while.”

“Fewer distractions,” I said. “He’s going to finally get his book done.”

“You
must
look up my brother. You’ll adore him,” Esther told us. “He’s like me, only far, far sweeter, smarter, richer, and more talented. And I promise you, his wife, Sara, is a dream.”

“
Another
Sara?” I asked. “It’s like there’s some kind of cosmological attraction—I have two of them already.”

“She’ll be worth any confusion you might suffer, you’ll see.”

*   *   *

With everything packed for transit, we took ourselves to the Plaza for a final night before sailing. I’d hoped for a quiet evening with just the baby and Scott; instead, Biggs and Alec stopped by for drinks, then Bunny and his new wife—Mary Blair, an actress, of all things—brought dinner, then Townsend arrived, then Ludlow, who had the waiters bring fruit crêpes and coffee. Scottie spent her last night in America stuffing herself with thick, sweet cream—which, inevitably, didn’t agree with her, so
my
last night was a mostly sleepless one as I washed the vomit out of her clothes and hair, and mine.

Once we’d gotten on board the ship and were under way, though, all the world as we’d known it ceased to exist.
So long, New York. So long, America
. I stood at the rail with my squirrel coat wrapped tight around me and Scottie in my arms, and Manhattan receded as if waved away by her miniature hand and my larger one. Now, finally, at long last, the Ferris wheel had stopped turning. I’d ridden by choice—I’m not saying otherwise—but that doesn’t mean I didn’t need to, and want to, get off after a while.